All the World's A Stage: Giles Havergal Comes to the Loeb

Ask Giles Havergal why he became a director and the rich, fluent responses momentarily trail off. "It's...I...No...I...I don't know if I can do justice to what is absolutely the most central and important thing I do. I don't know why I love directing--it's like saying, 'Why do you love this person?' It's multifarious, intellectual and personal." Or at least it is when Havergal directs. And exuberant, theatrical and infectious, according to the cast that has worked with him for the last two months on the Loeb Mainstage production of Beaumarchais' Figaro.

Havergal recently accepted a long-standing invitation from George Hamlin, producing director of the Loeb, to come over from his home in Glasgow, Scotland to direct a student production of a play of his choice. In Glasgow, Havergal directs and manages the Citizens' Theatre, which houses a small, active repertory company. One of his partners is playwright Robert David MacDonald, who adapted and translated two plays by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais into this Figaro, and who has also been a recent guest director at the Loeb. "We're always looking for people who can make a rare contribution to theater by directing a play here," Hamlin says. "I met Giles in London several years ago, and we've been trying to get together on something since. When Giles couldn't come, he sent Robert David MacDonald."

Havergal took over the 100-year-old Citizens' Theatre in 1969, and began immediately to construct a permanent company and an international reputation. "We're a state-subsidized theater in a large industrial city with very high unemployment, and yet for the last eight seasons we've had a marvelous rapport between the actors and the audience. There are 15 actors, all paid the same, all the same age--there's no attempt at having a juvenile, a leading man, an ingenue, or anything like that. All the plays we do have to fit that number; if there are 30 parts, then we combine two or three into one role," Havergal says. The company performs mostly classsical work, much of it re-shaped and re-interpreted, and the style is visually flamboyant, brazenly theatrical. Havergal says, "We do a lot of foreign work, a lot of Brecht. Not very much contemporary work, with the exception of Orton, Bond and Williams, as well as a new play every year by Robert David MacDonald."

What about major contemporary British playwrights, such as Storey or Osborne? "We don't want to do them--for stylistic reasons. Lots of them tend to write for a 'naturalistic' theater. I think they write in a style where what is seen on stage has to convince the audience that it's the real thing. But the only reality is the actor on the stage and you're watching. Our company is beautiful, eccentric, talented, and the fun is using and stretching the limitations." A recent production of Tennessee Williams' Camino Real, for example, was done in drag, with all female parts, save for one, played by men. Why? "All the women were involved in another production."

Now that the company is on vacation, Havergal has found the time to direct at the Loeb, and to do a recent Regent's Lectureship on Drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he lectured on theater management ("I love the Barnum and Bailey part of it all," he says), and conducted a directing workshop. "I was particularly keen to come here and work with students on a production," Havergal says, "because I haven't done any work with them since I left college [Oxford]."

Havergal created a strong first impression by casting Figaro in front of the 30 people called back. "The auditions were spread out over three evenings, and it was all a workshop type of thing with acting exercises and no scripts. On the last night I called back the people I wanted to see again, and then told them who I wanted to use and who I didn't want to use."

This approach bothered several members of the cast, who described the evening as "excruciating." He simply said to the people he didn't cast, 'I won't be needing you,' which is a lot tougher to take than not seeing your name on a list," Amy Aquino '79, who plays a leading role in the production says, adding, "I felt bad about it for a while." Unlike most Harvard productions, where auditions are individual and private, Havergal chose to let everyone perform in front of everyone else. "It was in a lit house where everybody wanted you to fail because they wanted your part," Jon S. Goerner '78, who plays the servant Figaro, says. "You feel terribly guilty if you went there with 40 people and you were the only one who made it. But I loved it," he adds.

"I can see how some people might be upset by it," concedes Havergal, "but I wanted it to be an educational thing, where everyone could see just how you do cast, so you can see what a quirky, individual thing it is. Each person was making up his own mind along with me about what was best. I think casting should be done very openly--except of course for my private conversation with George while watching, things like 'he's not very good;' that shouldn't be open. Often an actor has the feeling that 'oh, he's better than I am,' and here people saw what kind of person was cast in each role. And I think that it's far less cruel than all that business about coming back the next day."

Aquino: "Giles is very different from most directors."

Goerner: "Yes, he knows what he's doing."

One week before the opening, the 11 actors in the production split into two groups and began to scream Italian gibberish and profanity at each other, five actors onstage, and six at the top of the Loeb auditorium. "All right," says Havergal in a beautiful, melodious British accent that sounds just like every British accent ought to sound, "Now choose some lines of yours in the play, and let's hear you deliver them in the same tone to each other." While the five actors onstage proceed to do so, Havergal huddles with his group at the top and begins whispering excitedly. One catches snippets: "You see how it's working?.... Amazing!.... Smashing!.... it will take your sound and magnify it...resonant..."

"We had just moved into the auditorium from the little rehearsal room," Havergal says later, "and I wanted to get them accustomed to pitching their voices to the size of the building. That way they all listened to each other, and learned from each other."

Havergal uses acting exercises and improvisations frequently, both as warm-ups and as contributions to the actor's understanding his/her character. "I don't know what exercises do for the surface of a play," says Havergal, "but they contribute a lot to the bottom part of the iceberg, the resonance of a play." One of the exercises that the Figaro actors did was to turn their characters into statues, and then make the statues grow larger and larger. Figaro employs a very theatrical style of acting, gestured, European, Latin. "The characters have to be very big, but they must be rich, not caricatured," Havergal says.

The exercises give way to individual decisions about characterizations, which Havergal monitors but does not actively push. "Giles draws the character out from inside of you, instead of imposing it on you," Ralph Zito '81, who plays a leading role in the production, says. "You watch for a spontaneous revelation," Havergal says, "a moment when something in the text will give them a clue or a bridge to cross." "He gives you a lot of leeway," Aquino agrees. "It seemed like the play came out of us. If we're not comfortable with a piece of blocking, Giles will say, 'By all means, change it,' and then he'll watch us and let us know if it's all right."

"Giles makes sure that everyone feels that the characterization came from inside them," says Hamlin. "His psychology worked well with one actor in particular, who is very opinionated about what he can and cannot do. Giles very wisely has found other ways to get him to do what he wants."

Havergal acted professionally for a little over a year, and occasionally plays parts in Glasgow. His movements are lithe, and his gestures expansive without being overwhelmingly "theatrical;" occasionally he will demonstrate what he means by reading a line himself, but not very often and always advancing the reading as a "suggestion." Most directors bark out orders, confusing their actors and exhausting their stage-managers. Some, the nice ones, may preface their demands with a "please," or end them with a "thank-you." Havergal always asks. "Is that okay?" he will say, and you get the feeling he means it. "He's very charming, and very polite. More polite than any student director," Aquino says. His speech is peppered with words like "smashing," and "marvelous," and, according to Hamlin, "his sense of humor is tremendous."

"It's particularly fun watching Giles deal with new American expressions or traditions," Zito says, adding, "Nothing fazes him except eating a double hamburger with your hands." Zito relates an "amusing" story about the time Havergal watched some members of the cast dribble ketchup over themselves. You had to be there.

Following him around before the open dress rehearsal is like accompanying a particularly jolly doctor on morning rounds. He greets each person warmly, inquires how they are, and adds, "Had a shout?"

"A what?" someone asks.

"A shout, a yell, some sort of physical or vocal exercise."

He inspects the set, a marvelous concoction by Joan Ferenchak, draped with a Brechtian-type banner reading "Figaro," and helps to roll out a rug. "These are two remarkable plays," Havergal says of Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, "and the playwright was a wild, extraordinary man, a pamphleteer and a music teacher. But very soon after he wrote them, one was taken over by Rossini and the other by Mozart, and the operas effectively put a smokescreen over the originals. Cutting and combining the two plays gives the whole show a fascinating irony. The first play was lighter-hearted, and ended happily with the Count marrying the girl, Rosina. But in the second play, the situation changes--the Count, the hero of the first part, is trying to make off with his servant Figaro's intended bride. In the first play the servant had an alliance with the master; here he plots against his master. That was a revolutionary thing to do in France in 1784. And the audience's attitude during the first play is that we love the Count as a young buck chasing after the girls, but he becomes a villain in the second half because of the same qualities that made him a hero in the first--only now he's married. The play ends with a pithy interchange on the nature of love and marriage. It's quite fascinating."

Adaptor MacDonald directed the world-premiere of Figaro in Glasgow; this is the American premiere. Is Havergal at all dissatisfied with the relative inexperience of college actors? "I don't really see much of a difference," he says, adding "Actors are actors, and these people are absolutely committed. At no point have I ever had to think: They're only students." Is he completely satisfied, then? "You're never completely satisfied, and that's nothing against these actors," Havergal says.

Havergal will fly back to Scotland tomorrow, but the play will run until May 6. "A few of the actors were a little upset at first about that," a member of the stage crew, who wishes to be unidentified, says, adding, "Because, really, they're not professionals."

"A moment comes when the actors take over the play," Havergal says. "Anything a director has planted grows in their shape. No director has total control, or needs to stay in total control, and I don't think a director should want to--unless it's a film, where ultimately he does have the final say. The actors expand your concept in many ways; they make a production richer and more personal. And then when the audience comes, and the actor gains the actual experience of performing for them, then the director's work is through."

And he leaves behind--gulp--one of the smoothest, most enjoyable, and most professional Harvard shows this year, proving that great directors need not be distant, tyrannical or tempermental. If Havergal can't explain what a director should be, it may be because he embodies it. "He's got a lot of class," Aquino says. "He brings those good, British-style cookies to rehearsals--none of this pretzels and Coke shit."

Smashing.